Tag: fault

Last year my brother in-law gave us an XBox 360, “That’s nice” you might think however it had the dreaded 3 red rings. He had tried to get it replaced by Microsoft but had got himself worked up into a bit of a state with the operative over whether it was covered or not and gave up (A little too quickly to be honest) offering the box to us saying “If you can get them to fix it it’ll cost you nothing however if you have to get it repaired your looking at £75“.

Now I deal with Microsoft a fair bit so I know how frustrating they can be sometimes anyway I rang the support line and calmly and carefully jumped through the hoops that to be honest most company’s put you through. The operator agreed it was faulty and gave me a reference number and sent me the details to ship the box back to them via UPS free of charge.

Within a week the replacement unit came back, interestingly it was a different one from the one I returned as the serial number was completely different I think what they do is the moment UPS confirms they have collected your faulty one the replacement is shipped as there is no way it could have got to its destination, been repaired, then shipped back to us in such a short space of time.

Last week the dreaded 3 red rings returned on the replacement box, now to be fair I’d say the unit was by now about a year old although that’s still no excuse for something as expensive as these units are. I rang Microsoft expecting to be told “I’m very sorry sir but…” how wrong I was the operator was very helpful and said she would be getting an empty box sent to me and to place the unit along with the power supply (We’ll come back to the power supply in a minute) in the box seal it up and arrange for it to be collected.

Four days later an empty box was delivered having travelled from Germany to Watford (UK) then Barking (Essex) and finally to me in the West Midlands. I packed everything as instructed and the following day UPS collected it, four days later the replacement arrived whoopee! However there was no power supply! I rang Microsoft and explained what was missing “No problem I’ll arrange for a replacement” a few days later and a package had arrived from Microsoft, unfortunately they had sent the kettle lead only. I rang them again explaining that I needed the ‘Brick’ power adapter “No problem sir here is another reference number” four days later and the ‘Brick’ arrived.

Now I hear a see lot of MS bashing in the Linux community, I’m not a big fan of it to be honest I’m neither a fan or a hater of Microsoft but I’m not ashamed to say “Well done Microsoft” for exceptional Customer Service.